Contact Center Automation Newsletter - A Research Paper

Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Center

It was a model of frustration that had prevailed for decades. Contact  centers had no other choice but to implement costly proprietary telecom  equipment that fragmented communications across different systems and  made administration a constant struggle. In 1994, however, Interactive  Intelligence changed the thinking of the industry with an approach to  communications that was completely new.
The path Interactive Intelligence took was to create a single, consolidated software platform with inherent multichannel applications to deliver all  the functionality a contact center and enterprise needed. That product,  launched in 1997, was called Customer Interaction Center (CIC).
With its unique standards-based, all-in-one architecture, CIC’s aim was  to replace multi-system infrastructures and tons of hardware with more  manageable and less expensive application servers. For contact centers  in particular, a more cost-effective option to proprietary vendors and their  legacy systems was long-awaited. With CIC’s integration to CRM systems,  legacy PBXs, databases, e-mail systems, vertical applications and other  technologies, contact centers could finally deploy a single communications  platform from a single vendor to do everything they needed. From  configuring routing rules for incoming calls, e-mails and Web chats, to  setting up IVR applications and outbound predictive dialing campaigns,  contact centers could now easily accomplish it all with a single point of  administration.

Early adopter of open standards
Knowing voice over IP (VoIP) and the SIP communications standard were emerging, Interactive Intelligence had the foresight to develop its software from the ground up using open standards. Following it’s initial release in 1997 of the first standards-based, all-in-one communications software  suite, in 2002 Interactive Intelligence became one of the first vendors to  incorporate SIP into its all-in-one communications software suite. Today,  as contact centers increasingly displace their TDM systems with IP-based  communications solutions, CIC offers them a proven, streamlined, allsoftware migration path to VoIP.